Nate Silver: U. of C. grad gets it right

November 08, 2012

Nate Silver predicted on his blog that the president would get 51 percent of the popular vote. (Chicago Tribune 2008)

WASHINGTON — — Nate Silver was right. The Gallup Poll was wrong.

Silver, 34, a University of Chicago graduate and the computer expert who gave Obama a 90 percent chance of winning re-election, predicted on his blog, FiveThirtyEight (for the number of votes in the Electoral College), that the president would get 51 percent of the popular vote as he predicted each of the 50 states, including all nine battlegrounds.

"Nate Silver, right," said Bill Burton, who moved from the White House to the pro-Obama super political action committee Priorities USA Action.

Gallup's daily national tracking poll put Republican nominee Mitt Romney ahead by 5 percentage points until it was suspended because of superstorm Sandy, and a final national survey released Monday gave the Republican a 1-point advantage.

"These polls are designed only to measure what is happening at the time of that poll in terms of the national popular vote" and are not "designed to be predictive," Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport said.

With the count in Florida still to be finished, Obama was leading Romney nationwide by 2 percentage points, 50 percent to 48 percent, and won a decisive Electoral College victory.

Two university-based pollsters joined Silver in correctly predicting Obama's win, and one of them will be dead-on about the electoral vote tally.

Drew Linzer, an assistant professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta and a former pollster based in California, predicted Tuesday morning on votamatic.org that Obama would end the race with 332 electoral votes and Romney 206.

Sam Wang, a Princeton University professor of neuroscience, posted his final prediction — that Obama would likely get 303 electoral votes to Romney's 235 — on the school's election blog at 2 p.m. Tuesday. He revised Obama's total downward from 332 based on late polls Tuesday.

Florida, with its 29 electoral votes, hasn't been called by The Associated Press. Its outcome will determine which of those professors' final forecasts was accurate.